In a virtual desktop (DT) or laptop (LT) environment, a user's personal data and/or settings may be stored in a location other than a device used by the user to access and use the user's virtual DT/LT. For example, VMware™ View is a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) product sold by VMware. In a VDI environment, all data is stored in a corporate data center, rather than on hundreds or thousands of personal computers (PCs). Traditional data protection products typically back up data at the source. In the case of “desktops”, that's the PC. Desktop/Laptop (DT/LT) specific products are no different—they typically have a client agent for running the backups and providing a user interface for restores. Since, in a Virtual Desktop (VDI) environment and similar environments, all of the data is already in the datacenter, the most efficient model would be to back up the device(s) used to store the data. However, the way the data is stored typically is specific to the virtualization vendor, for example VMware in the case of VMware View, and is not intuitively associated with individual user's PCs.
It is currently possible to back up user data as stored at a datacenter (e.g., the “datastore” or other storage device used for the VMware View infrastructure and user data), but due to the way the data typically is formatted, the datacenter backup may only be useful for disaster recovery purposes, for example to restore the entire datacenter in the event of catastrophic loss. It is also possible to back up user data for virtual DT/LT's using traditional DT/LT agent based technology, but this requires running (potentially) thousands of backups, with the risk that not all clients will be online during the backup window. And the more virtual clients that exist in an enterprise, the more stress that places on both the backup window and the backup server infrastructure.